Stephen, the son of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall who never knew his father: ‘Kids were secondary to the parties’

When actor Humphrey Bogart died on January 14, 1957, his children Stephen and Leslie were eight and four years old, respectively. Now 75, Stephen reflects on his childhood and feels that he never truly knew his famous father. “My father would go to work, shoot in the studio all day and when he came home he’d want to have dinner with my mother [actress Lauren Bacall]. He’d say, ‘Hey kids, how are you?’ — and then we’re done, we’re out of there,” Stephen recalls in Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes, a new documentary that explores the life of the iconic American actor, of which Stephen is an executive producer. He also believes his father never truly got to know him or his younger sister. “Kids were always on the periphery. They were secondary to the guys and girls getting together. The drinking, the smoking, the laughing, the parties,” he says, describing the brief moments they spent together.

Stephen Bogart downplays this absence, arguing that times were different then. But he does so, perhaps, because he’s already been through it all. At one point in the documentary, he recounts an episode that marked a turning point for him. It happened in the spring of 1951, when Humphrey Bogart left to film The African Queen. His fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, joined him for the six-month trip, while two-year-old Stephen was left in the care of a nanny. But the nanny suffered a stroke and died suddenly as the plane took off, right after Stephen had waved goodbye to his parents.

“So what does she [my mother] do? She thinks, ‘Do I go to Africa with Bogie and Huston and [Katharine] Hepburn and have a lot of fun? Or do I go home and take care of the kid?’” recounts Stephen Bogart, who reveals Bacall opted for the first choice. “Now I don’t blame my mother for doing what she did. But I’m not sure that I would have made the same choice.”

Stephen, now retired, has spent years working in television news production and occasionally writing semi-autobiographical books. He lives in Florida with his second wife, Carla, and their white puppy, Wiley. It is in the comfort of his home that his testimony was recorded. “I’m not a student of my father. I needed to find out who I was. It took me years to feel comfortable with the whole Bogart thing,” he reflects on the burden of bearing such a legendary name.

Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes is a comprehensive look at Bogart’s rise to fame, which came late but left a lasting legacy. It features archival footage and never-before-seen material, including voiceovers by the actor himself. The film also delves into the more intimate and less glamorous aspects of his life, including his three failed marriages and his battle with cancer, which left him weighing just 36 kilos in the final months of his life.

“I wanted a child to stay with her and remind her of me,” says Humphrey Bogart in part of the documentary. And that son was Stephen, who closely resembles his parents. However, Stephen questions whether that resemblance may have been a double-edged sword for Lauren Bacall, who was widowed in 1957, at the age of 32, and outlived Bogart by almost 60 years.

“I was a reminder of him, but I was also a reminder that he’d died and left her with two young children,” recalls Stephen, whose middle name is Humphrey. “In her own book, she says, ‘I wanted Bogie to have my children.’ Which is kind of the same thing. They remind you of me and they remind me of you. That’s not the ideal reason to have kids, “So yeah, I reminded her of him. That was a positive and a negative. She freaked out when he died. We moved to London for a while. Then she wanted to go to New York to be in the theater. She was dragging us around. She married Jason [Robards], who was an absolutely brilliant stage actor but he kind of looked like my father — and so I’m sure she compared Jason to Bogie, too. There were always pictures of Bogie around the apartment.”

In 1995, Stephen released a book titled Bogart: In Search of My Father. “For countless millions, Humphrey Bogart’s screen performances and real-life persona merged to make him one of the world’s most fabled figures,” the blurb reads. “But for his only son, Stephen, eight years old in 1957 when his father died of lung cancer, Humphrey Bogart’s giant shadow was a burden he carried until he finally came to understand the private man behind his father’s public face.”

“[I] was kind of trying to find out who he was as a person,” Stephen admitted in an interview with FilmNoir in 2015. “I can’t picture his voice, other than on film. I don’t think he was around that much, as much as he could have been.”

His mother, on the other hand, passed away when he was 65. While it was undoubtedly a sad event, Stephen didn’t experience it as a tragedy, but rather as a natural part of life. “When you lose your mother, of course it’s upsetting, but you can’t be sad for her [because] she got to do what she wanted to do,” he said after Bacall’s death. “I talked to her that morning and she was fine. She had a stroke and died in 7 hours and she wasn’t in any pain. How much better could it be, really? I really wasn’t sad because of the life that she got to live.”

Despite feeling a lack of love and attention during his childhood, or how long the shadow of his parents — particularly his father’s — seemed to loom over him at times, Stephen has always been very close to them. As the child of Hollywood stars, he has dedicated much of his life to managing his father’s legacy, which includes overseeing the estate, controlling his name and image, managing his social media presence, organizing an annual Humphrey Bogart film festival, running a film company, and promoting a liquor brand, Bogart Spirits. Stephen was also the driving force behind the 70th and 75th anniversary celebrations of Casablanca, in honor of the father he barely knew. In contrast, his sister Leslie has taken a more private path, working as a yoga instructor and nurse in Boston, and is married to yoga master Erich Schiffmann.

In 2012, Stephen and his sister Leslie boarded the boat from The African Queen, the same vessel Humphrey Bogart had filmed on when he left to shoot the film, leaving Stephen alone and traumatized by the sudden death of his nanny. The boat had been restored after being found abandoned in a Florida harbor, and the siblings were invited aboard. What in the film had served as the setting for a daring escape from German troops down a treacherous river was, in real life, an anticlimactic experience for Stephen. As he casually remarks in the documentary, “I have a piece of the tiller. My sister has a piece of the tiller.“It was a fun ride, I guess, but it was a boat, that’s all. It didn’t really do anything for me.”

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